need RAID Controller advice

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geekcomputing

[H]ard|Gawd
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Aug 30, 2004
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I am looking to buy a Raid Controller so i can hook up my 2x Solid State Drives (OCZ 30Gig Vertex) in Raid 0. I have tried my onboard Raid but its not stable.

Im not looking to spend a ton, maybe 70 or so.
all i really need is something that is quick, supports Raid 0, and its super stable.
4 total SATA ports would be nice but 2 is obviously the min required.

Any suggestions guys?
Pls help.

p.s. im running windows 7 64 bit, amd 4 core 3200mhz, 8 gigs of ddr 3, ati 5700 1 gig, asus m4a79t deluxe mobo.
 
You have AMD southbridge and those aren't shipped with very good onboard RAID drivers. What exactly were your problems with your onboard array?

Do you need to boot from it? Else you could try software RAID0 in windows itself.

Hardware RAID is very useful for RAID5 on windows, but may not be worth its money for a simple RAID0 array especially for SSDs where software RAID tends to scale much better.

But i know Areca has a 2-port hardware RAID0 controller. Many other cheap SATA RAID controllers are just driverRAIDs just like your onboard AMD; so that wouldn't help you much probably, depending on what your issue was.
 
Yes i would like to boot from the raid 0 SSD's.

The problems im having is i can set them for raid 0 and install win7 but usually after about 10 or so reboots it will magically be unable to detect any harddrives. I have updated the firmware of the SSD's to the latest but the problem still persists.

moneys not a big issue as long as i can keep it in the 70'ish range.

any suggestions?
 
Well this is the 2-port Areca Hardware RAID controller:

ARC-1200.jpg

http://www.areca.com.tw/products/2ports.htm

But it's not cheap. Perhaps not using RAID and just using two separate SSDs would be more logical?
 
going non Raid might be more logical i guess, not nearly as fun though.
at 170 the areca is a no go. way out of my price range.
 
Without RAID you would still have the benefit of having access to TRIM, which on Windows currently doesn't work when using RAID.
 
Using hardware RAID for SSDs is odd in itself. What other low-cost options does he have? Buying those cheap PCI/PCIe fakeRAID chips won't do him much good if he just moved from that.

I think he should use them in AHCI without RAID; any other option is probably not worth it.
 
sub.mesa said:
I think he should use them in AHCI without RAID; any other option is probably not worth it.
Click to expand...

I would agree, you are just adding latency by going with RAID and will not allow TRIM so in the long run your performance will actually be worse.
 
It's a powerful feature modern SSDs use to maintain their speeds over time. In essence TRIM gives unused space back to the SSD, which uses it to accelerate new writes.

If you use RAID on Windows, or any other driver than Microsoft AHCI/IDE driver or Intel's 9.6 AHCI driver, then you will not have access to TRIM and the speeds of your SSD will decline over time. The speed can be 'reset' to factory conditions by doing a secure erase on the SSD, but this will destroy all data on the SSD so having TRIM capability is highly advisable.
 
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